Or, when life gives you apples, use Linux

Seemingly harder to remove with every eye-glazing gist and thread... A mac plagued with an is_mdm_removable=false Mobile Device Management profile: the worst! 🙂

First, boot into recovery mode by rebooting while holding down the Command & R keys.

At this stage, you'll need to connect to the internet briefly to download the recovery OS. This provides a few tools including like disk utility, support, an osx reinstaller- at the top menu, you'll find an option to access a terminal.

Once in there, you'll want to:

Disable SIP:

csrutil disable

Then reboot:

reboot now

While holding down Command + Option + P + R to start afresh with cleared NVRAM.

Reboot once again while holding down the Command & R keys to return to the recovery OS. Reinstall whatever version of OSX it offers- instead of trying to deal with the slippery, network connected DEP plists & binaries contained within the various LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons found in the /System/Library directories directly, we'll let Apple finish with the ConfigurationProfiles first, then sneak in and remove them.

While this stuff is cooking, get yourself a usb stick and a penguin, such as Budgie:

wget -nd http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/20.04.1/release/ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
umount /dev/sdc 2>/dev/null || true
sudo dd if=ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1048576 && sync

Boot up again, this time holding the Option key for the bootloader menu. Once in the live usb system, make sure you can read Apples HFS filesystem:

sudo apt-get install hfsprogs

For me at least, I needed to run a quick fsck to fix up the headers before I could mount the osx filesystem living at /dev/sda2 (sda1 is the efi partition):

sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sda2

Now, lets go in there and remove those ConfigurationProfiles:

mkdir badapple
sudo mount -o force /dev/sda2 badapple
cd badapple
sudo rm -rf private/var/db/ConfigurationProfiles/*

🙂